IMAXimum Batman

Christopher Nolan and his cinematographer, Wally Pfister, really like analog filmmaking. For Batman Begins, they minimized CG FX work, eschewed digital cinematography and even skipped the DI in favor of good, old-fashioned anamorphic Panavision lensing to 35mm. Well, Batman Begins looked great, and made lots of money to boot. What do they do for an encore?

Four sequences in the Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight (slated for release next summer), will be shot in Imax. No, they won’t just be shown in Imax. They’ll be photographed with Imax cameras, printing the image onto Imax film — essentially 65mm film stock running sideways, maximizing the negative real estate given to each frame at a 1.43:1 aspect ratio. (It’s 15-perf!) When you watch the movie in an Imax theater, the aspect ratio will open up vertically from the widescreen frame of conventional cinematography to Imax’s less rectangular shape, which is much closer to Academy ratio.

Brilliant. By shooting with actual Imax cameras, the crew will avoid the technical issues that bedevil 35mm blow-ups to Imax. I saw 300 in an Imax theater, for instance, and thought the print was surprisingly ugly — there was a general muddiness to the image, along with basketball-sized film grain that danced around the darker parts of the frame. It’s also a little disconcerting to see a theatrical screening that has to be letterboxed, with the Super-35-originated image hanging there in the middle of a huge, but otherwise blank, screen.

It also brings a little something extra to the theatrical experience that won’t easily be replicated on DVD, with its 1.77:1 native aspect ratio, HD DVD, or even at digital cinemas with their 2K projectors that should be easily outclassed by the resolution of a proper Imax print.

Film technology nerds always get a little giddy at the prospect of capable directors deciding to screw around with large-gauge film and/or changing aspect ratios. From Abel Gance’s Napoleon (with its famous tiptych sequences designed to be screened using three separate projectors) to Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (which was mostly 1.66:1, but with virtual-reality sequences shot on Super Panavision 70 and intercut at 2.2:1 in surround sound), there’s a tradition of experiments that try to take maximum advantage of mixed screen and/or acquisition formats. Even Stan Brakhage, the famed American avant-garde filmmaker, hand-painted one of his films (“Night Music”) on Imax stock — although the folks who commissioned the work eventually declined to exhibit it, and it was commonly screened in a heartbreakingly downscaled, but shockingly intense, 16mm version.

There hasn’t been a feature film shot entirely in 65mm since Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 version of Hamlet, although I was surprised to learn today that some scenes in 2005’s The New World were photographed in Super Panavision 70. (But it was never exhibited in 70.) But, as far as I know, there’s never been a studio feature film shot using the Imax camera, which ensures The Dark Knight a place in the film history books. What remains to be seen is whether this Imax experiment will be remembered as the beginning of a new interest in large-gauge filmmaking, or just a particularly vigorous death rattle of old-school film technology.